John Milius has frequently complained that as a Hollywood Republican he is subjected to a degree of personal criticism and critical hostility that other more traditionally liberal figures have escaped, but such a claim essentially serves to gloss over the fact that Milius has made some of the most boring films of all time.
Indeed, no-one knows how to throw away a great concept and a good opening more than Milius. His 1984 Red Dawn would be a perfect example: the first two minutes, with the Soviet troops surreally drifting down into the school yard mid-class and proceeding to blow everybody away, rapidly decelerates into a turgid and directionless morass of sentimentality, patriotism and celebration of the warrior code, topped off with a truly excruciating monologue from Rip Torn’s Rogue Soldier on the indefatigability of the American spirit.
Prior to his directorial debut and only half-decent film Dillnger (1973) (though really it's impossible to determine to what degree the whole affair isn’t simply carried along by the sheer charisma of the cult actor’s cult actor, the great Warren Oates in the title role), Milius worked on the scripts for the first two Dirty Harry movies, Dirty Harry (1971) and Magnum Force (1973)
.Both films garnered hostile reviews from the “Liberal elite”. On one level, what’s dirty about Dirty Harry is that he enjoys blowing criminals away and doesn’t attempt to disguise it, what’s dirty about him is that he openly despises the criminal underclass (here blacks and perverted Hippies). He’s not dirty in the traditional sense of the term, implying that he’s corrupt, he is in fact too moral, he cares too much and this is what brings him into conflict with the truly corrupt institution, a well-meaning, politically-correct establishment that wants to “mollycoddle” criminals.
There’s a strange dialectical move in Dirty Harry in which the killer threatens that his next victims will be “a nigger or a catholic priest” to the evident horror of the police force, as though the murder of a black man or woman represented some kind of ultimate evil to the San Francisco police force, yet Harry himself can shoot three black bank robbers and terrorize a fourth with his “do you feel lucky, punk” speech (written in its final form by Milius). Dirty Harry and as the title implies, Magnum Force, were also films in which the gun was as much the star as the leading man, foreshadowing much of the later fetishizing of weapons in the Eighties action movies. Indeed, Dirty Harry’s Magnum is on display in the National Firearms Museum.
.Both films garnered hostile reviews from the “Liberal elite”. On one level, what’s dirty about Dirty Harry is that he enjoys blowing criminals away and doesn’t attempt to disguise it, what’s dirty about him is that he openly despises the criminal underclass (here blacks and perverted Hippies). He’s not dirty in the traditional sense of the term, implying that he’s corrupt, he is in fact too moral, he cares too much and this is what brings him into conflict with the truly corrupt institution, a well-meaning, politically-correct establishment that wants to “mollycoddle” criminals.
There’s a strange dialectical move in Dirty Harry in which the killer threatens that his next victims will be “a nigger or a catholic priest” to the evident horror of the police force, as though the murder of a black man or woman represented some kind of ultimate evil to the San Francisco police force, yet Harry himself can shoot three black bank robbers and terrorize a fourth with his “do you feel lucky, punk” speech (written in its final form by Milius). Dirty Harry and as the title implies, Magnum Force, were also films in which the gun was as much the star as the leading man, foreshadowing much of the later fetishizing of weapons in the Eighties action movies. Indeed, Dirty Harry’s Magnum is on display in the National Firearms Museum.
Milius followed up Dillinger with two more laboured and pretentious historical dramas, The Wind and the Lion with a comically miscast Sean Connery and my personal contender for most tedious film of the Seventies, Big Wednesday. One of the reasons “Charlie don’t surf”, in Milius’ famous line for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, is perhaps because they realize how stupefyingly tedious it is and would rather read some Marx instead.
And then defeat America in a war.
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